It was the top school, but we weren't happy

by Celia Brayfield

"I didn't expect my school reunion to be an emotional rollercoaster. We didnt do emotion at St Pauls Girls School, a No. 1 seed in the educational league tables ever since it opened its massive oak doors to girls in 1904.

By the late 1950s, when most of my year were sitting the ruthlessly competitive entrance exam, women students made up only about 10% of Oxford and Cambridge, and 13% of the intake of medical schools. Perhaps it was because we had so much to prove that we had the school experience we did. Perhaps it is also true that nobody had a good time at school in the decades that followed the Second World War. And perhaps it was because we were raised with the stiff-upper-lip standards of the post-war era that many of us had never told anyone how unhappy we were.

Email made the difference. Our head girl tracked us down and alerted us to the schools centenary celebration. The first voice to decline the invitation said simply that she didnt feel brave enough to go back to the school. Somebody else confessed that just reading the words "the Marble", the name of the schools entrance hall, made her feel sick and panicky. I added my discovery, that everyone I had interviewed had negative memories of the school, from the glossy recent graduates to the 80-year old who became a Dame at the end of a career in the Civil Service.

The floodgates opened, and a lot of long-stifled pain poured into our Inboxes, together with astonishment that those "other girls" who had always seemed so poised and confident had left with the same crushing sense of inferiority. Particularly poignant were the memories of girls who had struggled with what are now called "learning difficulties", such as dyslexia or dyspraxia. I was among them, marked with the shame of extra "handwriting" lessons until I was 14. We, of course, had got the message that we were stupid and lazy. It has taken years to realise that, in fact, we are clever and hard-working, and maybe more creative and a lot better educated than most. Now that Im starting to look back over my life, a big regret is the vast amounts of energy that I have dedicated just to proving that Im not stupid.

So thirty or so women, some powerful and successful, some modest and dedicated, brought out and shared memories that we had kept locked away for decades. The experience, for me at least, was almost shocking.

There is a long-established genre of writing about boys public schools, with their snobbery, bullying and sexual abuse. Women dont have the same frame for their school experiences, and unhappy girls have less dramatic potential than rebellious boys.

Instead, girls have been required to polish up the vision of their schools as a jolly-hockeysticks world of pillow fights in the dorm. But we didnt play hockey at St Pauls. The only snobbery that was rife was the intellectual sort. Ours was an austere enclave dedicated to a single purpose.

If I have to describe the school culture, I say simply that we raced in blinkers towards the goal of that Oxbridge scholarship. Our role model was our head teacher, Miss Osborne, who lapsed into classical Greek pronunciation whenever she used a diphthong. Academic achievement was what we were therefore, and so we worked. And worked. And checked our work and worked again. I took a theoretical twelve hours of work on the 75-minute Tube journey home every night through the A-level years, and sat in my freezing suburban bedroom until past 4.00am, trying to keep my eyes open to get the essays finished. I failed the exams anyway and never, until just recently, expected anyone to be interested in how I felt about it.

If being women meant that we had no culture of anger to frame our feelings, it meant also that we found a way through this jungle of emotions by our empathy for the people who shared these hard experiences – our teachers. As we reminisced, several people thought of teachers who had lost their husbands or fiancês in the war. Even more poignant were the memories of a gentle Latin teacher who always wore black lace gloves, because, as only some of us knew, her fingers had been mutilated by Nazi torturers. We had teased her and now we felt remorse.

Those of us with daughters also felt concern for girls at the school now, upon whom the academic pressure is probably just as relentless, and added to the all-round superwoman imperative that demands they be not only brilliant, but also thin and cool and ever-ready to invite a celebrity magazine into their lovely homes.

Then the fun memories began, of the suet puddings for lunch, the bread fights and the secret reading of forbidden books, such as the newly-published Lady Chatterleys Lover.

We were grateful too, for having acquired a love of learning. So many teachers had inspired, amused or terrified us, and some of us had become teachers in turn, and then remembered wryly the rigorous standards of behaviour that have now vanished.

When the centenary day arrived, the class of 63 was one of the largest of the groups bonding over their picnics in the new sports hall. Perhaps the general surreality of the experience heightened it.

Afterwards, more emails confirmed a feeling of having released ourselves into a new friendship. We had taken a reality check and realised that we were OK. However bad we had felt at the time, we had survived, and none of it mattered. All fears overcome and misgivings forgotten, we took pleasure in each others company and made plans for another reunion. Anywhere but near the school."

So the other area where we can be most traumatised is at school. Two areas: our homes, our schools. Two periods, where at our youngest we are set on learning. Two areas where the damaging effect of a lack of understanding whether by parents or teachers is doubly great.

The figure below summarises the behaviour pattern. It adds the effect on those who challenge the leader – they leave.

 

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